How To Save Web Articles To Read Later On Your Non-Tablet Kindle

We’ve all been there — you’re surfing the Internet and find a great article that you’d like to read. But there’s so much to do and you know you shouldn’t take the time to read it right now. So you decide to save it in your bookmarks to read later. When you go to save it, you realize all the other articles that you meant to read, that you’ve never followed up on, are there too. Soon you have accumulated so many articles to read you feel overwhelmed and never get to them. It’s not that they aren’t interesting anymore, they just aren’t in the right form. Sometimes just reading articles on a computer screen can be tiresome.

Services such as Evernote can be beneficial to save web articles to read later. But what about people, such as myself, who don’t have any mobile Internet-enabled devices besides a laptop and a “non-tablet” Kindle? Personally, I don’t have a smartphone or an iPad to browse my “read later” articles with. And let’s face it, reading actual web articles on a Kindle Touch doesn’t look that great. There is “Article Mode” but then again, reading web articles only works if you’re connected to Wi-Fi.

Be assured that no matter what your dilemma may be for reading those articles you’ve saved to read later, there is a solution — in fact, there is more than one solution.

Setting Up Your Kindle For Wireless Delivery

Before you explore the routes to receiving your procrastinated reading, you must become familiar with a few steps in preparing your Kindle for wireless delivery. Because honestly, who wants to save articles to their computer and then upload them to a Kindle through a connected USB — that’s “old school”.

On the side panel you will see a section titled “Your Kindle Account” which has two pages that you need to be aware of – Manage Your Devices and Personal Document Settings. Once you click “Manage Your Devices” you will see that you have a specific Kindle email address. Keep in mind that this is specific to you and should not be shared with anyone.

On the “Personal Document Settings” page you can customize it to your liking as well. At the bottom there is a section called “Approved Personal Document Email List” — this is important to note the location for easy access later once dealing with the different services.

It is important to know that only Wi-Fi-enabled Kindles receive free delivery. Kindles with 3G, such as the Kindle 1, Kindle 2, Kindle DX, Kindle 3 3G, Kindle Keyboard 3G and Kindle Touch 3G are all charged small fees by Amazon for delivery over 3G whenever the Kindle isn’t connected to a Wi-Fi network.

Methods Of Sending Articles To Your Kindle

There are a couple of methods that you can choose from to send articles to your Kindle. The method you choose depends entirely on your preference. Most services offer both of these methods, although you can find some that only offer one. These are bookmarklets and extensions.

Extensions, as previously stated, typically offer more features than bookmarklets, but that is entirely dependent on the service. I recommend using extensions developed directly from the service itself, but there are some exceptions where an extension developed by a third-party is trusted and works well, if not better than the official extension made by the service.

Each service provides you with a specific email to register that service to your Kindle account.

You also must provide the service, or services, with your specific Kindle email address. Keep in mind that if you ever change that email address, you must also change it within the service to continue to receive wireless deliveries.

Services To Choose From

There are many services and applications that deal in sending web articles to your Kindle, but I will focus on a few of my favorites which I have had great success with. These services offer both methods for sending your articles and are also compatible with all major browsers. The initial setup process for each service is very close, so once you do one, the others are just as easy, if not easier.

Instapaper specializes in a few things as a service, and integrates them into the Kindle reading experience. Instapaper has been known for simplicity in reading articles — no photos, no ads, just content. With the black-and-white Kindle screen, images are often not really needed. Also, due to the relatively small screen size, ads and photos alike can get in the way of what you really want – content.

To use Instapaper you must first create an account and, like all of the services mentioned, Instapaper provides you with a special email address to register to your Amazon Kindle.

The walkthrough of setting up the process to send your articles to your Kindle is straightforward, as Instapaper does a good job in explaining how to go about the process. There are a few options regarding how often you want to receive a new delivery from Instapaper (daily or weekly) and the time that you’d like to receive it. It is important to make sure you set it to send the unread articles to your Kindle automatically. As a free user you are able to receive 10 articles per issue or you can purchase the service and receive 50 articles per issue to your Kindle.

To send articles to Instapaper within your web browser, you can use a third-party extension or the bookmarklet available on Instapaper.

There are many third-party extensions for Instapaper so I can’t say all are good, but with trial and error you should be able to find one that fits your style. They are available for the Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera browsers. Personally, I use InstaChrome as it, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, works very well with Chrome.

Once you receive the Instapaper issue, you will be able to scan through all of your articles in two different views, which integrate very well into the Kindle interface.

Reading articles sent from Instapaper on your Kindle is great. Free of any text ads or photo ads, but also free of photos from within the article. For the most part this is okay, but what about “how-to” articles, such as this one, which rely on photos to explain how things work? It can be difficult to follow those and I found myself going back to the article online and reading it on my laptop, which is somewhat counterproductive. The next two services provide a solution to this problem.

Pro Tip: If you would like to archive and save the read article for later, there is an IFTTT process that sends articles liked in Instapaper to Evernote. This is quite handy if you’d like to refer to the article later on any other device you own.

Readability is another excellent service for saving articles around the web and, recently, I also discovered it sends articles to the Kindle. As I previously mentioned, Readability also displays images in the articles it sends the same way they appear in the original web article.

Once you create your Readability account, check out the account settings page and follow the instructions to set it up to send articles to your Kindle. Readability offers a feature to send a daily digest of all your sent articles at a convenient time for you each day.

If you want to try this out immediately, an option at the bottom of the account settings page allows you to send the digest right away instead of waiting for whatever time you chose to receive your daily digest.

The bookmarklet that you want to use for sending articles to your Kindle is titled “Send to Kindle.” The other two bookmarklets are “Read Now” and “Read Later.” All three of these options are combined within the Readability browser extension.

Klip.me offers several tools, one of them being the ability to send web articles to your Kindle. To do this, it uses browser extensions (available for Chrome and Safari) and a bookmarklet, which is compatible with all major browsers – Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari and IE9. Once the extension is installed, the settings page will automatically open. To access this page via the bookmarklet, type klip.me in your browser’s address bar (or just click the link provided) and then click the bookmarklet. The settings page will automatically open. To access the settings page from your browser extension, right click on the extension and select “Options”.

The settings page, like the other services, provides you with the means to add your Kindle email address and see your Klip.me email address to add to your approved list on your Kindle account. There are check boxes that provide options like 1-Click Send, keeping images with the article and increasing paragraph spacing.

You can also sign in with your Google account to save your clipped web articles to your Klip.me account in the cloud. Also, if you sign in, there is a check box to enable a feature for users in China to break through the “Great Firewall,” as Klip.me refers to it.

Conclusion

Now you have the means to send the articles you stumble upon while browsing the Internet to your Kindle. If you have any questions, I’m happy to answer in the comments below. Do you use any other services to send web articles to your Kindle? We’d like to hear about them! How do you think this will impact your overall online and Kindle experience?

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Maxi3w

July 3, 2012

Hi, Any ideas out there for the same kind of services and in a similar way to send articles straight to the Sony e-reader??

Aaron Couch

July 4, 2012

I did a couple searches and couldn’t find anything, but I will keep looking and let you know if I do find anything. Personally, I’m not real familiar with how the Sony ereader works. If anyone else is more familiar with it, please chime in!

Sergey Pozhilov

July 5, 2012

Unfortunately Kindle is the only e-reader with such a great feature. I will not be surprised if that’s because personal documents delivery is an integral part of Amazon’s patented Whispernet.

Sergey Pozhilov

July 4, 2012

Aaron, you’ve forgot to mention Sendtoreader (http://sendtoreader.com) which was first introduced to Makeuseof readers a year ago: http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/sendtoreader-web-pages-to-kindle/. Since that time, s2r has been drastically improved and can now deliver not only individual articles from web, but also send to your Kindle full text rss feeds and even bundle those feeds into single periodical. Another great new feature of s2r is this new addon: s2r.me. Type it (with slash: s2r.me/) in front of any URL in the kindle’s experimental browser and the page will be sent to the same kindle in its native format. That’s the easiest way of sending web pages from kindle to kindle.

Aaron Couch

July 4, 2012

Wow thanks for mentioning this Sergey! I did know about SendToReader. I wanted to steer from automatic RSS feeds of blogs and focus more on manual techniques done by users on a per-article basis.

HOWEVER, I didn’t know that S2R had that feature within the Kindle. I will definitely try this out. And hopefully all the other readers will find your comment very useful too!

Thanks again.

Sergey Pozhilov

July 5, 2012

I see…
Just one thing about s2r.me people should be aware of: the person who is going to use that tool should be a registered user on sendtoreader.com. That’s because s2r.me will ask for username/password before sending anything, and will use user settings (kindle email, etc.) taken from his or her sendtoreader account. Fortunately, it will do that only once (session will be saved in cookies)